Upgrading your computer. Easier than you thought.

So, you want to upgrade your computer, but you don't want to spend a lot of money? It's easier than most people think. You already have a lot of parts that can be salvaged for a new computer. When most non-technical people think about computers, they think of the entire tower as the "brain" and the monitor as the "screen". Truth is, if your screen still works, you don't need a new flat-panel one -- they just look nicer. (Actually, in practice, a CRT monitor is capable of higher resolutions than an LCD monitor.) And your "tower" (or case, or chassis) is good as well, along with the optical drive (your CD/DVD reader/burner) and hard drive. Your power supply may or may not be.

The first thing to do is to open your case. This can be scary at first, but you're not going to break anything that wasn't right about to break on its own. Before you open the case, disconnect everything but the power cord. Leave the power cord plugged in. If there is a power switch on the back of the power supply, turn it off. Typically there are four or more screws on the back, along the sides and top. Note that there are a few screws around the power cord. Do not unscrew these as these hold the power supply in place. (You don't want that falling and busting up the inside of your computer.) With the case screws out, you should be able to remove the "top". If your tower stands up, it's technically on its side. The bottom of any case is the "side" the motherboard is on. That's going to be the right side of your standing tower, so what you think of as the left side is actually the "top". The "top" may slide off or lift off. In some cases, a shell will slide off the top, bottom, and side. In any case, removing the cover should not be a problem.

Now let's take a look inside the case. Rotate the case so that where you plug everything in, is facing you. This puts the front of the computer (where you put the CDs/DVDs in) away from you. That big circuit board in the middle is called the motherboard (or the "mobo" in geek culture). You don't need to replace it, but if you want to upgrade your computer, you're going to have to. You really don't want to take it out unless you have to, it's a real pain in the ass to put one in (geeks reading this are nodding), but never mind that for now. To the left, but sometimes to the right, is a block where the power cord goes in. This is the power supply, and it's your best friend right now. Because it's still plugged in, it's electrically grounded. Work on a computer on a high counter, standing, and keep your feet in one place. If you have to move, to get something, touch the power supply for a second to "ground" yourself. This will prevent you from "frying your mobo" (discharging static electricity onto a circuit board, short-circuiting it). On the far side of the chassis are your drives. That big 5" wide one is your CD/DVD reader/writer (they all look the same -- even Blu-ray drives, they all look the same). Hard drives are 3" wide. Depending on their connection type, they'll either have a 1.5" ribbon cable (IDE) or a 3/4" plug (SATA) plugged into them, and a four-wire plug. The former is data (either way), the latter is power.

Now let's look at the motherboard specifically. Basically they are all the same. On the right is the PCI cards. If you were to add something like a modem or a TV tuner, or a USB hub, to your computer, you'd plug it in here. It would slide in like a Nintendo cartridge to one of those slots, and its ports would face out the back of your computer. The leftmost one is either AGP or PCI Express and would support a video card, for playing games equivalent to what an Xbox 360 or PlayStation 3 can play. To the left of that is the processor, which you won't see under the fan and heatsink. This is the actual brain of the computer, a giant calculator, and it needs direct cooling. Beyond the processor and a little to the left is the RAM. One to four sticks that also plug in like Nintendo cartridges. This is your computer's memory. If someone says they have "four gigs of RAM" they mean they either have a 4GB stick, two 2GB sticks, or four 1GB sticks. Your crappy computer you're upgrading may only have two slots. That's a sign of a "value" mobo. It probably sucks in other ways. The rest is stuff you don't need to worry about... and where the power, drives, and front ports plug in.

Special note here: A monkey can probably upgrade your computer. Anyone can swap out the stuff, it's not exactly rocket science. Nothing can be plugged in wrong, it all goes in only one way. There is an exception though: USB and IEEE1394 (Firewire) plugs look exactly the same. You have to know which is which. If your case's front panel doesn't have Firewire, never mind. But you'll still need to not plug your USB line into your new mobo's Firewire port. That would be really bad and could fry your mobo.

Buying the parts: This part is easy. And you would do this before opening the computer, but you should know to read a guide before following its steps, so...

Start with the processor. The processor should account for about 60-75% of the speed increase in your computer. Make it count. Unless you have cash out the wazoo, don't even think about Intel. Intel spends a lot of money making pretty ads, and their customers pay for those ads for the priviledge of displaying the "Intel Inside" sticker on their case. I'm talking hundreds of dollars more. So go to Newegg.com, and under the logo, under the left, point at Computer Hardware and click on CPUs (or is it Processors?). Narrow your search to AMD processors. You can get a quad-core AMD Athlon II for about $120, a triple-core AMD Athlon II for about $80, or a dual-core AMD Phenom II for about $100. (Why is the dual more than the triple? It's a Phenom, they're better.) All three are good choices. Get the quad if you can afford it. If you really want to upgrade your computer, its processor probably only has one core. A dual core processor is two processors in one... basically. A triple is three and a quad is four. Yes, newbies, your computer can have four brains. They don't all work at once, but say you're booting up... One core is handling the basic Windows stuff... your antivirus comes on... another core takes that. Then you open up Firefox, because you're not a complete newb and you know how to block ads... a third core can take Firefox. Sort of. One last note: DO NOT BUY AN OEM PROCESSOR. It won't come with the heatsink or the fan. You need these. And no, your old one will not work. Retail isn't gonna be much more than $10 more, if that. And it comes with all you need.

Next pick the motherboard. I'm pretty sure all the processors I mentioned use AMD Socket AM3, but once you've picked the CPU, double-check in the specs. Open a new tab, back to Newegg.com, and motherboards under Computer Hardware. You want an AMD motherboard with an AMD chipset (not NVIDIA). The latest AMD motherboards all seem to come with HDMI (High-Def Multimedia Interface) as well as your typical VGA (old monitors) and DVI (newer monitors) ports. This is good for most users. There are a lot of choices here. I like Gigabyte; ASUS is a popular one as well. MSI isn't bad either. Can't say about the rest. Price-wise, you get what you pay for. You can get a really nice Gigabyte board for around $140. That isn't bad for really good stuff. ATX, if you see it (and you will) is just the motherboard standard. They're all ATX unless they're mini-ATX, which is smaller (and you may need that, check the measurements of your current mobo). There was a BTX but it failed. Anyway, you want to make sure the motherboard has onboard video (unless you're a gamer, in which case you won't want that... but this guide isn't for gamers anyway) and onboard audio.

Now pay attention to the kind of RAM the motherboard you want, takes. Search for that in a new tab. There will probably be 2-3 kinds (speeds) of RAM it takes; they should all be taking DDR3 RAM at this point. (If not, you're looking at an old and/or crappy motherboard.) You're pretty much shooting for quantity here. 2GB is fine if you're sticking with Windows XP, but that's not a wise idea at all as Microsoft has stopped supporting it. Windows 7 is great and it's good for pretty much everybody. For Windows 7 you should get 4GB. 2GB is okay... but you want 4GB. 8GB if you can afford it. Also, the more sticks the merrier, but it'll limit your upgrade potential. The bigger a stick is, the slower it is, generally, so four 2GB sticks would be faster than two 4GB sticks, even though both configurations result in 8GB of RAM. The only advantage the latter has is you can add two more 4GB sticks for a whopping 16GB of RAM (which would be epic). Anyway, the absolute best brands for RAM are Corsair, OCZ, and Patriot, pretty much in that order. Kingston is okay as well.

A note on brands: I've given my opinion based on my experiences... I haven't been paid a dime by any of these companies to drop their names here. If you want to save a couple bucks and go with something else, just pay attention to the reviews. If it's good (or bad), the reviews should tell you.

Building it... okay, now I'm assuming you've read this guide and you have (at least) a motherboard, a processor, and some RAM... and your old case.

First... I don't wanna say "rip everything out" but that's basically what you're doing to your old motherboard. Everything but the RAM and CPU. Leave those on the board (no reason to remove them). Start with power cables. These come from the power supply. There's a 20- (10x2) or 24-pin (12x2) (or possibly a 20-pin and a 4-pin together) cable going to the motherboard. There may be a 4-pin (2x2) going by the processor as well. The power supply also connects directly to fans and drives, but leave these alone. Next disconnect drives. Follow the data cables back, they should plug in somewhere on the motherboard. Now disconnect your front-panel stuff. Lastly, your expansion cards. These are typically screwed into the case on the metal part. Unscrew it, and pull the card out. Remember, hand on the power supply. And they come out like Nintendo cartridges, but pull back a little, as the little "bar" thing can get stuck between the motherboard and the case.

Now unscrew the old motherboard. Keep the screws in a safe place, you'll need them for the new one. Once you have all of them out, you can lift the motherboard up and out. Mount it on your wall or something. I think they make great decorations.

Under the motherboard will be a bunch of pegs. These are called "standoff screws". Screw hole in top, screw in bottom. They can be taken out by hand, or with needle-nosed pliers. Hopefully you will not have to remove any.

Take your new motherboard (again, hand on the power supply) and hold it over the standoffs. Keep in mind where they all are. Make sure you can see all of them through the screw holes in the new motherboard. Also keep in mind that you will probably not use all the screw holes. That's fine. You primarily want the four corners, under the processor (stability for the fan), under the RAM, and under the video card if you're installing one. This guide doesn't call for one though. You do not want a standoff to come up where there isn't a screw hole; that can fry your board. Remove/move any standoffs you do not need.

Once the motherboard is in place, most of the hard work is done.

"Seating" the processor is the easiest step you will take BY FAR. I'm dead serious. Next to the processor socket there is a lever. Lift it up. Look at the socket, the processor can only sit on it one way. (Look at the corners -- it'll be different in one corner by one hole.) Look at the bottom of the processor -- same thing. One extra or less hole. Line it up. Set the processor down. Push the lever down. It's stupidly easy.

Installing the heatsink is among the hardest, though. You will either get a dallop of thermal paste, or more likely the heatsink will just have it on the bottom, and you'll have to pull off a paper (like on a bow, when wrapping presents). Do not touch the grey stuff, it smears easily. You'll notice the heatsink has links, and there should be hooks on two sides of the socket. Or vice versa. The trick is to set the heatsink square on the processor and get the hooks in the links. This is real tricky. But it's not rocket science.

Now for the RAM. Look at the bottom (where the RAM will go into the motherboard. There's a "gap" in the chip dividing it about 60/40. Look for the same on the slot. That'll tell you what way the RAM goes in. Pull the hooks out either end and insert it as straight as you can. And give it a good hard push. When you have it right, the hooks will snap in and grab the gaps on the ends of the stick. Do this for each stick you have. If you have two sticks, you have to leave a gap between them. For example, if you imagine the RAM slots are 1, 2, 3, 4... insert the RAM sticks in 1 and 3... or 2 and 4. Your choice. If you have four, fill 'em all. You can't do 3. It won't boot.

Then you just have to connect your drives, power cables, and front panel connectors. The plugs may have moved a little, but they should all be there. You'll have to refer to the paperwork that came with the motherboard, it should tell you where everything plugs in.

If you have done everything right, connect all your peripherals and turn it on. Windows will go batshit crazy with all the new stuff, but it *should* be fine. You may have to restart a couple times. Once everything is good to go, you can put the cover back on.

Did you want a Blu-ray reader/writer, or even a DVD writer? DVD burners are all around $20 on Newegg, and Blu-ray burners start at $100. They're piss easy to install. Simply unscrew the old optical drive and pull its cables, then mount the new drive, and put the old drive's cables into the drive... unless you had an IDE drive (fat ribbon) and upgraded to a SATA drive, in which case you will need a SATA cable and a SATA power cable (or adapter). Bigger hard drive? Pretty much ditto, unless it's your C (Windows system) drive you want to replace. In which case, bad idea partner, just put it in as a secondary (or tertiary) drive. Mount it, find a free data and power cable, and plug it up.

Do you need a new power supply? They run about $100 for good ones. It's too big to fit in your little case? The power supply can actually sit outside the case (the case is actually optional -- wrap your noodle around that), just cover the hole so mice don't get in.

It should be noted that this guide does not guarantee your success at upgrading your computer. A bunch of stuff can go wrong -- this is why 99% of people pay Dell to build them a piece of junk from value parts what I pay to build a premium computer. No amount of reading will compensate for experience, and you can't read enough. This guide is only intended to show how easy it is. And it is easy if you know what you're doing. But the best favor you can do yourself is watch the newsstands for Maximum PC. Great magazine, and unofficially and without meaning to, perhaps, at least once a year they publish a guide to building your own computer. It'll just be an article, and it'll be mentioned on the cover. For the love of all that is holy, buy the damn mag, yes, at $10 or whatever (toss the disc -- all the software on it is 3 months out of date and free to download) and read the article a dozen times over. It was such an article back in 2004 that inspired me to build my first rig. And it worked perfectly on first boot and for six years thereafter.

So, I had $20 to spend on the Android Market

Four months ago, my wife finally decided enough was enough with her Motorola RAZR 2, that ultra-thin flip phone with the touch screen on the outside. Motorola makes nice phones (my ROKR Slider was still in top condition) but this was a real piece of crap. So we went to US Cellular (where you have to go to get service outside of town out here) and told them she needed a new phone. She didn't want a free phone, she wanted something at least as good as the RAZR 2 when it was new.

We both left with new phones that day. The best deal they had on decent phones was a BOGO on the Samsung Acclaim, a touch-screen slider running Google's Android Linux operating system. This wasn't a proper cell phone, it's a handheld computer with, among other things, a phone program. And in addition to a cell phone antenna, it's got GPS, a camera, an accel... uh, it knows it's moving and in what direction, and a magne... uh, it knows which direction it's pointing. And a 3 megapixel camera.

But the really neat thing about an Android phone, like an iPhone, it has a Market where you can add new apps. Most of them are free, but there are some that cost real money. The best things in Android are free, just like anything else, I suppose, but US Cellular gave each of us a $20 gift card to use on the Android Market. Because it's a Google Checkout gift card, the first thing I did was try to buy The Beatles: Rock Band on a Google Checkout site. It didn't work. So I started buying apps. And not just any apps, stuff I wanted for various reasons.

Here are the apps I bought, in the order I bought them, what they do, and why I paid for them.

Aldiko Premium ($2.99)
This paid version of the Aldiko eBook reader removes the ads that would show up in Aldiko from time to time. The ads never showed up in the books themselves, or even your bookshelf. It only ever showed ads when you were browsing its virtual bookstore. So this paid app is really a donation, but when you consider how awesome it is to have your books on your cell phone (handheld computer, whatever) I think it was worth donating to the developers.

ASTRO File Manager ($3.99)
My most expensive purchase. The "File Viewer" that comes with Android sucks balls, and I previously tried the file manager by EStrong. It had some nice features, but once I tried the free ASTRO, I was converted. Unfortunately, while EStrong is free, ASTRO displays an annoying banner ad on the bottom all the time. This gets in the way, but more importantly, I just wanted to support a good product. This file manager lets you move files around, and includes a task manager. Good stuff.

Overkill ($0.99)
The first of two games I bought, and the price is misleading. I bought it on sale. It's a side scrolling space shooter that you can control by tilting the phone. It's hell hard and I bought it on a whim. I rarely play it, but it runs great on the Acclaim (which I understand is an entry-level phone), which can't be said for Angry Birds, a more popular phone game. So part of this purchase was impulse, and another part was to reward the developer for making efficient code.

TxtPad ($1.00)
Finally, an app that doesn't have a price ending in 9. Does anybody even fall for that gimmick anymore, or is it just expected? Anyway, for being a handheld computer with a hardware keyboard, Android doesn't have a text editor. The free version of TxtPad is very nice and doesn't have ads, but I bought TxtPad for the extra features (editing stuff, nothing essential) and because I figured I'd get a lot of use out of it.

Solitaire for Android ($0.99)
One of the first things I did when I got this thing was download a ton of Solitaire apps. There were a lot of stinkers, but this one stood out. I kept the ad-supported one for a while, always intending to pay to remove the ads. After a few purchases, I wanted to get this one before I ran out of money (which wouldn't happen for weeks).

Droid Talk Pro ($0.99)
This text-to-speech toy has been a hit with every child I've shown it to and even a few adults. Type in some text and it will say it. You can add a British accent, and a slider controls the pitch. It never sounds unlike a robot, but it's decent. The free version had an ad, I think, and the paid version will let you make anything it can say into a ringtone. Both versions have common phrases you can tap to make it say, I suppose if you have a sore throat. The app also features a translator, anything you type into it can be translated into a dozen or so (maybe more?) languages, and it will speak them. It also has speech-to-text (-to-speech) so you could carry on a conversation with a foreigner, if they speak into it and you translate it back to English. So this may be the most useful app here. (Not sure if the translator is available in the free version or not.)

Ultra Keyboard ($2.79)
Pro-tip: The default touch keyboard sucks. You want to replace it ASAP if you want to use your screen to type anything. I tried SlideIT, which lets you trace across the keyboard, and I didn't like its accuracy. I then tried SwiftKey, which claimed to predict the next word you were going to type. That was nice, but it didn't work in some strange places, e.g. text messaging. So that got uninstalled in a big hurry. Ultra has all the features. It has the keyboard tracer, and it actually works! I have yet to warm to the feature, but it being accurate helps a lot. It has text prediction, which isn't as accurate as Swift's, but since it's dictionary-based and not habit-based, it pulls stupid guesses a lot less. I mean it may not be as accurate, but its guesses make sense. Oh, and they come up when using the physical keyboard as well. It has another feature the Acclaim isn't powerful enough to use: It'll activate your camera and let you see what's in front of your phone, I guess so you can text and walk without running into stuff. Also, it will calibrate your screen, have you type something, so it can correct your mistakes better. I can't say enough nice things about this app. It's the one keyboard on Android Market worth paying for, and it isn't even the most expensive.

Spark ($1.50)
The only other evenly-priced app I bought. Spark is an Xbox Live client for Android that lets you send and receive messages from fellow gamers. You can also see their gaming history (and your own). It's very nice. It used to be free, but Microsoft changed the way Xbox Live worked (around the time they released the new Dashboard for the console) and it broke the app. Since the new Windows Mobile phones do Xbox Live stuff, I imagine Microsoft is gonna fight this guy some more. I don't know how successful he's gonna be keeping this app running, but I enjoyed it before and wanted to help out. (Didn't have a choice -- there is no free version. But I would have paid either way.)

Tapatalk ($2.99)
A forum interface for Android. This replaces the frontend you see on Internet message boards with one familiar to Android and lets you read and post messages through it. A free version lets you read, but not post. The catch is that the forum owner has to specifically enable Tapatalk access, and 99% of them haven't. And I can't find any forums worth posting on in its directory. Still, I've been calling for an app like this for the better part of a decade (albeit for PCs) so I felt obligated to support somebody who was trying to make that happen. Hopefully it works out for him.

Chandroid ($0.99)
Like Tapatalk, this is an Android frontend to various image boards (channels, as they're known in Japan, where the concept apparently originated), including the infamous 4chan. I really only got this for shits & giggles because I had $1.47 left and nothing to spend it on. /b/, the "random" board on 4chan, is literally the crotch of the Internet, but 4chan itself has its purposes. I like to look on /wg/ for wallpapers, for example. (And no, I'm not above looking to see what's on /s/.) Anyway, Chandroid provides access to another app called Meme Maker (memes are Internet fads) that makes funny pictures. I see great things in this app's future. Chandroid itself is kinda slow, but do the math... image board... cell phone Internet... it's not a smart combination.

Whew! I didn't do a very good job selling some of these apps, did I? Well, the money wasn't really mine to start with, and I couldn't do anything else with it, but buy Android apps. If I didn't have the gift card, would I have bought any of these? Probably not. However, I did buy LauncherPro Plus, which wasn't listed because it's not on the Android Market. Google takes a third of Market purchases, and either LP didn't want to share, or they didn't want to raise their price to include Google's take. In any case, it had to be bought with PayPal, and I actually ponied up $3.99 out of my checking account to buy that.

For those of you with Android phones and thin wallets, here are some cheap alternatives:

Aldiko Premium >> Aldiko. The free version does everything the paid version does. Just spread the word about it, they ask for that more than they ask for donations on their Facebook page.

ASTRO >> EStrongs. EStrongs isn't a bad file manager by any stretch of the imagination. Or get ASTRO and deal with the ads.

Overkill >> Any Android game, there are tons.

TxtPad >> TxtPad. The free version is fine.

Solitaire for Android >> Solitaire for Android. Deal with the ads... or use one of the other Solitaire apps.

Droid Talk Pro >> Droid Talk. The free version still talks and is just as big a hit with the under-five-feet-tall crowd.

Ultra Keyboard >> Ultra Keyboard Demo. I forget what the limitations are. But if the demo doesn't convince you that $2.79 isn't too much to upgrade your keyboard, you're probably fine with the default or the slide-out keyboard anyway.

Spark >> Xbox.com in your web browser.

Tapatalk >> Forums in your web browser.

Chandroid >> 4chan in your web browser.

Now, that being said, here are Android's heavy hitters that are just free, in alphabetical order:

Catch (free!)
This app takes notes, pictures, and scans barcodes, and syncs with Catch.com so you can see the stuff on your PC. You gotta tell it to sync though. Never mind the pictures and the barcodes, just imagine your favorite multiplayer game and imagine "Notepad multiplayer" and you'll have a good idea.

Dropbox (free!)
Lets you download files on your computer's Dropbox folder. It's not a proper sync app though as you can only upload and download, and it's not automatic. (Not that you'd want it to be, but some people...)

Google Sky Map (free!)
My second-most-impressive app. People just love this thing. Point it at the sky and it will tell you what stars are what. It's a planetarium in your hand. You can even see what stars are below the horizon. It's pretty f***ing amazing.

Our Groceries (free!)
Multi"player" shopping list. You make a shopping list, and your partner can see it as they shop. You can even watch as they cross stuff off. Loads of useful features. Ads. Shame there's not an ad-free version. I would have paid for this.

Photoshop Express (free!)
What costs about a thousand bucks on the PC is legitimately free on Android. Okay, this doesn't have even 1% of the features of the real Photoshop, but it lets you touch up photos, and once you learn it (doesn't take long) you can turn crappy cell phone camera pics into pics that look like they were shot with an expensive camera. I do this by bumping up the saturation a hair, the exposure up or down a hair depending on the image, and messing with contrast. It does a lot!

Scoreboard (free!)
Sports fan? This app from Google asks you your favorite teams from each sport/division and notifies you when they start a game and the final score. I'm not even into sports, but I do have opinions on certain teams, and I like to know if they win or lose. (Does that make sense?)

Simple Spreadsheet (free!)
Another app I'd pay for. I use this for data entry at work. Think Microsoft Excel minus all the bells and whistles.

The Weather Channel (free! came with the Acclaim!)
Weather data for as many cities as I want. Need I say more? Oh, and with GPS enabled, it'll follow you on the road, giving current and future weather info wherever you go.

TweetDeck (free!)
I saved the best for last. Or the alphabet did. Whatever. Anyway, forget Twitter and Facebook apps and forget about accessing them in the Browser. TweetDeck rolls your social networks (Twitter, Facebook... and a couple others if you use them) into one social timeline. You get a second timeline for Mentions/Directs (Twitter) and Notifications (Facebook) and you can add timelines based on searches (e.g. I could search for Rockband and add the result as a timeline, and every time somebody mentions Rockband, it shows up. This is a resource hog so I don't do it, though).

So, as I said, the best apps are free, but if you have money to burn, hopefully this helps!

New on PortableApps.com: Freeware

PortableApps.com has begun distributing freeware apps in addition to open source apps on their site. Today: Skype and Chrome (and others). Coming soon... a whole lot more.

Guitar Hero 5 reviewed

The days of Rock Band games being clearly superior to Guitar Hero games are finally over. When Harmonix went to EA and MTV to make Rock Band, Neversoft tried not once, but twice to hold onto the "old" formula of guitar-only play, in both Guitar Hero 3: Legends of Rock (which came out before Rock Band, to be fair) and Guitar Hero: Aerosmith. Neither game was as good as Rock Band, let alone the last Harmonix GH, Guitar Hero 2. When Neversoft made their full-band game, Guitar Hero: World Tour (aka GH4), which came out around the same time as Rock Band 2, it seemed like they didn't bother looking for what didn't work in the first Rock Band. They kinda just threw something together, and it was a train wreck. Guitar Hero: Metallica, the second full-band game from Neversoft, had better music, if you like Metallica and '80s metal in general. Worse if you didn't, but the gameplay was about the same. Bad. Now Neversoft is stepping up the game with Guitar Hero 5, but have Neversoft learned from World Tour/4 as well as Rock Band 1 and 2? In short, oh yes. In detail, read on.

First impression
It's still Guitar Hero. Sign-in issues that shouldn't exist, do, and will annoy you to no end. Your "band" will develop stupid tricks for doing this stuff "just right". For example, it pays to have the same person sign in first (to be the "leader") every time. Stupidly stupid stuff happens when you don't, but some cool things happen when you do. More on that later. The menus seem bloated with too many entries. However, to its credit, the game goes into a "demo" play when you're at the menu, some song will play, and you can press a button (Y or yellow on the Xbox 360) and you jump right in. If you're on a guitar, you choose guitar or bass, lefty or standard, difficulty, and you're playing. Instantly. Anyone can press Y to join in. Just like that. This is the party mode you've probably heard about. It is quicker than quick play. No loading, no nothing. (No failing, either.)

Quickplay/Playlist
The Quickplay playlist is far more advanced than Rock Band 1 or Guitar Hero World Tour by a long shot. Like Rock Band 2, difficulty is given, on a scale of ten. (RB1 had a scale of 9, RB2 has a scale of 7, and World Tour had no difficulty notation.) Like other games, a sample of the song plays as you hover over each song. Album covers are not shown, as in Rock Band 2, but the length of the song is given. You can sort by "intensity" for each instrument (intensity is difficulty), total running time, year the song came out, name of the song, name of the artist/band, and maybe a couple others. You can make a playlist of as many songs as you want, it would seem. (RB1 had no playlist, RB2's playlist is seemingly unlimited, but WT's was limited to 6 songs.)

If you're the band leader, you can load and save playlists, too. But you can only load playlists saved when you were the band leader. If someone else was, everyone has to exit out, and that person must sign in first to become the leader, and then load the playlist. You can name the playlists, but Neversoft continues to not support the chat pad; you must enter text arcade-style.

Gameplay
The first thing you may notice is that Guitar Hero 5 lets you play as your Xbox 360 Avatar. Doing this, in fact, unlocks an achievement. In the first hour, too, don't be surprised if you get half a dozen achievements, if you're any good at all. Neversoft's plan thus far seems to be to lure Rock Band loyalists in with achievements and the promise of more to come. I think I have 135-185 Gamerscore with it already?

Anyway, a lot of the "band play" mistakes that World Tour made are gone. Star Power is no longer confusing. Like GH:A and previous, and both Rock Band games, each band member now has their own Star Power. (World Tour tried to "pool" Star Power, and it was just confusing.) Everyone also has their own crowd meter, as opposed to Rock Band's "shared" crowd meter on the left. The score now shows a sort of "band streak" I don't fully understand. GH5 introduces a new feature called "Band Moments", which is like the Unison Bonus in RB2. During a Band Moment, everyone's notes burn in flames for a few seconds. Hit each one and you get a big band multiplier. The band multiplier goes up to 11, between Star Power and Band Moment, if everyone's on the ball.

As such, scores tend to be a lot higher than in Rock Band 2. Expect a million plus points for a decent performance. For a long song with a great performance, don't be surprised if you get a few million. Also, for the first time, you can see each musician's individual score, in addition to the percentage and note/phrase streak. Score-wise, vocalists still get the short end of the stick. An expert guitarist scoring in the low 90s percentage-wise is going to get many times more points than an expert vocalist scoring in the high 90s and getting FCs. Jen complained about the vocals, but not as much as she did with World Tour. Even RB2 has sloppy vocal recognition, in parts, so vocals is bound to be a mixed bag anyway.

Soundtrack
The soundtrack is pretty damn good. "Smells Like Teen Spirit" by Nirvana is finally playable. John Mellencamp is finally in a rhythm game, for better or worse, with "Hurts So Good". All kinds of rock, from the 60s to today, is represented in this game.

If you have downloaded songs for World Tour - we do, but only 15 - they will play in GH5, but not right out of the box. You must download a 300MB patch (I have no idea why it's so big, but it IS FREE) which allows downloaded songs for WT not by Jimi Hendrix to work. (Maybe it just re-downloads your DLC in one patch, I don't know.) For $3.50 (280 Microsoft Points) you can export SOME but NOT ALL of your World Tour songs, specifically 35 of them, plus an additional 21 from Guitar Hero: Smash Hits (no, the DragonForce song is NOT one of them, dropping the ball becomes a regular thing at Activision). Still, it sounds like you can get a lot of songs in Guitar Hero 5. And, songs exported from World Tour and Smash Hits will also work as DLC in the upcoming, family-friendly Band Hero Neversoft is putting out later this year (to compete with Harmonix's kiddie offering, LEGO Rock Band).

Conclusion
All in all, Guitar Hero 5 is a good game that, for once, allows Guitar Hero and Rock Band to compete directly. Both Guitar Hero 5 and Rock Band 2 have good features I miss in the other, and they both have a lot of room for improvement. Rock Band will probably always have the larger library, even if Neversoft does figure out how to get the soundtracks of the previous games into the latest one. But Guitar Hero will probably always have the better exclusives. When playing the same song, on the same difficulty, on the same instrument, the track still differs from Rock Band to Guitar Hero, so even the same song is a different playing experience from one to the other. So it is definitely worth buying. And as an added bonus, they're going to give you Guitar Hero: Van Halen when it comes out in December? That's a great deal. And this is coming from a Rock Band loyalist.

Amazon Kindle: Strike Two

Last month or the month before, I wrote in general about the reasons I don't use an eBook reader like Amazon's Kindle, in a response to the controversy surrounding Amazon deleting eBooks remotely (which they weren't authorized to sell in the first place). Aside from that silly mess, my main gripe is that you must pay full price for a book, you can't buy it used, and you can't sell it secondhand when you're done, or even loan it to a friend without loaning out your $300 Kindle, and if you do, obviously you yourself can't read on it until your friend is done. It's a mess.

Now there's a new controversy around the $300 device (and yes, I love going on about how expensive the bloody thing is). If they get stolen, Amazon has the technology to see who stole it, and even to shut it down completely, but in the name of good business (as in, the thief paying for books), they're protecting the thieves' personal information, until ordered to release it by court order.

Talk about stabbing customers in the back, eh? $300 for the device, $25 for books (or whatever hardcovers cost these days, I know they vary), and if it gets stolen, even though they know who did it, they're just going to leave you hanging like that?

Enough's enough, people who have had this happen really need to lawyer up and sue Amazon. They're charging an insane amount of money for a service, basically encouraging theft ("if you steal one, you're just as good a customer as if you'd bought one"), protecting thieves, thereby encouraging it more, and basically they're obstructing justice. Sure, they comply with a court order, but if they know who has your Kindle and they're not telling you, they're an accessory, and at the very least, they ought to replace the Kindle, if it is such a big deal to them to keep the thieves' business.

Seriously, if your Kindle got stolen and Amazon won't help you, call your lawyer. At the very least, file a claim in small claims court. It's under five thousand dollars. If Amazon doesn't send a rep, they forfeit the case... at least, I believe that's how it works. And if they do send a rep, that rep's gonna have a hell of a time explaining to a judge why they're protecting a criminal and, at the same time, why they won't compensate you for your stolen property, when they make millions of dollars, and they're profiting from a crime against you.

...And this is coming from a fan and loyal customer of Amazon.com who has spent probably a few hundred dollars there on books, music, movies, games, Microsoft Points cards, and other stuff! But hey, I gotta call 'em like I see 'em - and this is bullshit.

Playing Rock Band on the computer

Anyone who's been reading this blog any amount of time knows I like Rock Band, and to a lesser extent, Guitar Hero. I love music, and for someone who doesn't have that level of personal connection with music that many people have, I do enjoy listening to music as much as anybody. Though I've never felt the inclination to pick up a guitar/bass or drumsticks, and the less said about my showering and driving singing the better, but there's something about the simulated playing these games offer that I like. I've always liked puzzle games, particularly Tetris and its variants. Manipulating blocks in certain ways to clear them. There was one cool Tetris knockoff for the Super Nintendo that came with the Super Scope - Nintendo's bazooka-looking gun controller, circa 1993 or thereabouts. You got so many shots per block - like 2-3, and if you didn't use all of them, they rolled over. Guitar Hero and Rock Band are kinda like that. You have to destroy the blocks or spheres that come at you - and sure enough, they burn up (GH) or explode (RB).

But a question that has always puzzled me is this: Why can only home video game consoles play these games? Rock Band 2 is available for the PlayStation 2, as well as the PlayStation 3, the Xbox 360, and the Nintendo Wii. Scaled-down versions of Rock Band are on the PSP, and coming soon (December, I think) to the Nintendo DS. A PC is many times more powerful than a PlayStation 2, to say nothing of the PSP and Nintendo DS. (In fact, while no PSP emulator to date has been made that plays commercial games, there are a couple DS emulators out there, so the DS version will be playable on the PC, albeit... less than legally.) All either Guitar Hero or Rock Band are doing is this: They draw models of four main characters, which are fairly detailed. The crowd is kind of in the dark, it probably takes less to render the entire crowd than it does to render the four band members. Then you have the stage, which is relatively complex at times, but it's still no more advanced than a sports game. (Nothing against sports games, but they don't work as hard to draw characters as shooters.) As for the actual... action, you have a multi-channel Ogg Vorbis file playing, with one or more channels tied to each instrument. There's a backing track that always plays, and if one instrument is not being used (e.g. nobody is singing) then that track plays uninterrupted through the whole song, but missing a note causes that track to mute for a second, and failing causes the track to mute until the failed player can be saved. This is all very simple to do behind the scenes. Then it draws the note highway, and colors the fret board for various events. When a bassist reaches a 5X or 6X multiplier or a guitarist is doing a solo, the board glows blue. When anyone's in overdrive, an animated yellow border is applied. As complex as it sounds and as pretty as it looks, the fact remains that the PlayStation 2 can do it, which boasts a mere 300MHz processor, or the equivalent of a mid-range Pentium II. Its other specs pale in comparison to average PC specs as well. So the evidence of the PlayStation 2 clearly states that any PC manufactured in the last six to seven years should be able to run Rock Band 2 without a hitch - if it were compiled for Windows, that is.

So why isn't it? The reason is pretty simple. Video game consoles have copy protection and digital rights management (DRM) PC manufacturers simply cannot get away with. Microsoft and IBM have both tried to force DRM on consumers, and the backlash both times was pretty overwhelming, to the point where they pretty much just gave up. Digital music stores, such as iTunes, are giving up DRM for freely-copyable MP3 files their customers are demanding. Consoles have always been so protected, and gamers have never complained. Console game piracy is very low compared with PC game piracy, though it does happen. The Nintendo DS is probably the easiest to do, as all you need is a microSD (memory card in cell phones - not the SIM card, the other one) to Nitro (Nintendo DS cartridge) adapter. The adapter looks like a DS game but has a memory card slot. Put ROMs on memory card, put memory card in adapter, put adapter in DS, and pick your games from a list. Couldn't be easier. PlayStation 2 hacking requires taking the unit apart and sautering. It's risky, it's tricky, and a lot of people don't do it. Xbox 360 hacking is very tricky and very risky, and all it lets you do is play burned games. However, the Xbox 360 has a killswitch Microsoft can trip remotely that fries the console. Better yet, they'll know why it's broken if you send it in, and won't fix it for you. So it's very much not worth it. So while people do pirate console games (and I have seen Rock Band 2 on torrent sites), it's a minority. Downloadable content, on the other hand, has never been stolen. Not once. DLC for Rock Band 2 is encoded and protected. There is no way to get it for free. If Rock Band were on the PC, hackers would find a way to crack the DLC and share it. Simple as that. Harmonix pays more for these master recordings than Apple does to license simple MP3s and AACs, so they need to protect their investment.

Still, the desire to play Guitar Hero or Rock Band on the PC has not escaped some hobbyists. The most common way to do that is by using Frets on Fire, which is free and open source. There is even a portable version which will run from a flash drive over at portableapps.com. Frets on Fire is no Guitar Hero, let alone Rock Band, but it really doesn't try to be. By itself, it's more a parody of those games. They instruct you to hold your keyboard like a guitar (keys facing away from you, backed up against your chest) and use F1-F5 as the fret keys, and Up and Down as the strum bar. Other keys activate the Overdrive/Star Power, and serve as the whammy bar. Trouble is, some songs have power chords (two or more fret buttons must be held while you strum - like red and blue, or blue and orange) and many keyboards can't process more than two keys hit at the same time. You hold F4 and F5 in preparation for a blue-orange chord, and when you go to strum... oops, it doesn't register. Sorry about your bad luck, Padre. The solution is rather amusing. You get a Guitar Hero controller for the Xbox 360, one of the old ones that plugs in via USB, and you plug it right into your computer. Windows will recognize it for what it is and will download drivers from Microsoft.com/Windows Update, and then the guitar will work as a standard controller. You can even play other games with it. Then, just configure Frets on Fire to work with a joystick/gamepad, and set it up.

Still, Frets on Fire is ugly as sin, but that is not hard to fix. With the FoFix mod, actually a fork of Frets on Fire (it replaces FoF entirely), you can add themes that change how Frets looks and feels. With the Rock Band 2 theme, it tries very hard to look and feel just like Rock Band 2, to the point of being eerie. It should be noted that this is illegal as hell, because it violates Harmonix's trademarks. It uses the Rock Band 2 logo (hell, it uses the whole damn title screen) and much of the graphics. When you're playing, it looks almost exactly like Rock Band 2. I think somebody reverse engineered the PlayStation 2 or Wii version. It's not the game and contains none of the RB2 game code, just the graphics.

Songs are tricky to find as well. Many forums that carry them require you to register, so they can track what you download. You can bet your ass that if they get busted, they'll sell you out in a heartbeat - why else would they make you register? You can probably find some free songs for it, for example Jonathan Coulton is a recording artist who releases his songs under a Creative Commons license. Last year or the year before, he released a song a week for a year. It's silly humor, but it's pretty good. (Check out "Re: Your Brains" - it's coming to Rock Band next week - "Skullcrusher Mountain" is already there.) Anything he's done would be legal to use in Frets on Fire. Other artists... not so much. Some songs come with just the notes, and you supply your own MP3 file. If you hit up torrent sites, you'll get complete tracks. But Frets on Fire doesn't use master recordings; like Guitar Hero, it just mutes the entire thing and/or belches/buzzes at you when you miss notes. Problem is, Frets doesn't un-mute the song after the missed note has passed, as Guitar Hero does. With FoFix and the Rock Band 2 theme, this isn't a problem.

Improving on Rock Band...

Last month, a couple weeks before Summerslam, I posted an article about what the WWE could do to improve its product, primarily for those of us fans, such as myself, who came into the program knowing it's fake, and enjoy it for its technical and production merits as well as the entertainment. I was contacted by a representative of a promotional firm representing the TV station WGN America and WWE suggesting I watch Superstars, WGN-A's hour-long WWE show. I watched and reviewed one episode (and continue to watch it - it's good), then Summerslam comes and I can't help but feel that one of my suggestions - that rules should be respected more - was taken personally by someone high up. Could be coincidence (and probably is - matches are planned and practiced well in advance of pay-per-views) but when I saw that match with Randy Orton and John Cena, and Orton kept cheating, and kept getting called on it... I couldn't help but notice something.

Maybe my luck, coincidental as it may be, will hold for another round. This time I'm taking aim at the music simulation/puzzle game Rock Band 2, having long held that it's not so much a game as a multimedia platform. Harmonix's Rock Band 2, preceded by Rock Band, Guitar Hero 2, and Guitar Hero (more recent Guitar Hero titles were made by a different company), have revitalized the ailing music industry, moving from a scene where pirates stole music online to one where people paid $200 each for a game disc and plastic instruments, and then $2 for additional songs, to play along with them on the screen. But it has been nearly a year since Rock Band 2 came out, and Harmonix is not producing a Rock Band 3 this year, instead focusing on the Beatles-themed Rock Band to come out next week. So one year in and people are still playing this game - is Harmonix just sitting back and letting the money roll in? Actually, no they're not. They put out half a dozen new songs each week, and that takes work. They're building a community of artists and programmers called the Rock Band Network which will allow musicians to build their own Rock Band tracks for inclusion into the game. This should exponentially increase the size of the Rock Band store, which Harmonix hopes to have stocked with 1,000 songs by year's end. Also, there is a rumor of a fabled "Gold Star patch" which notes which songs a player has Gold-Starred (beyond a five star performance rating is five gold stars), and possibly adds support for these new wireless microphones coming out... but little else.

While I certainly don't intend to suggest Harmonix isn't doing enough for its fans, I do have some ideas that would freshen the game up, make it feel new longer, and bridge the gap between Rock Band 2 and the eventual Rock Band 3.

1. Real-Life Rockers
Following the latest Dashboard update, Microsoft is now selling virtual clothing for your Xbox Live Avatar, at $1 for hats and glasses, $2 for shirts, pants, and shoes, and up to $5 for full costumes and "toys" - e.g. your avatar can now wield a lightsaber, or play with a radio-controlled ATV from Halo (yes fanboys, I know it's called a warthog).

Where is Harmonix on this? When you go to play, you have two categories of characters. The ones you've made, and the generic ones that come with the game (I prefer Ol' Smokey). You should be able to buy "Real-Life Rockers". When you own one of these avatars, and you play a song with them as a member, whoever has their instrument defaults to them, unless they've chosen a character they made. (Example: You buy a Nikki Sixx avatar, and select Ol' Smokey as your avatar, and play bass. You play "Saints of Los Angeles" by Motley Crue, and instead of Ol' Smokey, you get Sixx.) Or you can make your own supergroup. Deceased musicians would definitely be used, so for the recently-released Janis Joplin single "Piece of My Heart", you could have Janis herself singing it, and other songs you choose for your set list.

And where's the damn avatar support, anyway? Guitar Hero 5 jumped on this. To be able to use your Xbox Live avatar is trivial. While I'm at it, why can't I use my guy from Oblivion? Microsoft needs to make any company that lets you customize your character export the character in a universal format that any game can use, just because that would be beyond cool. And why can't you use your Oblivion mage or your Madden football player as your virtual rocker? If Rock Band's aim is to let anyone with a home game console be a rock star, why not a mage from an RPG or a sports star? Why even pick up the pen to draw that line? Sure, it's silly, but pick up a plastic guitar and tell me how seriously you take yourself. We don't play games to be serious, after all.

2. Real expansion sets
The Beatles should never have gotten their own game. Neither should Nirvana, No Doubt, Red Hot Chili Peppers, Stevie Ray Vaughan, the Foo Fighters, and others. What's that you say? Only the Beatles did? Therein lies the problem.

The other bands I named each got whole albums in Rock Band - in Nirvana's case, with the exception of "The Big Three" - "Smells Like Teen Spirit", "Lithium", and "Come As You Are", which are probably being held for Rock Band 3 and/or a slow DLC week. $20 for an entire album, which is a good deal, because it's more than the 10 songs that $20 would ordinarily buy you. Well, it's still not enough. If I'm laying down $20 - one-third the cost of the game itself - I don't just want songs. I want Real-Life Rockers (see above) of the entire band, and the opportunity to earn the 250 Gamerscore that paid DLC often adds to a game's total Gamerscore allocation.

That said, the Beatles could have just been an expansion set, albeit a much bigger one. Or they could have done volumes. In fact, Harmonix has said that the Beatles game will be a closed platform - it won't work with downloadable content, and its downloadable content won't work with other games. Have they not been listening to the Guitar Hero fans who have complained about this fatal flaw in the Guitar Hero franchise? It would be unwise to lean towards any of the disadvantages Guitar Hero has when compared with Rock Band; rather, it should be looking at the two or three things Guitar Hero does better, and integrate those features.

3. Unpause countdown timer
The most requested feature in Rock Band - how can I not throw my voice behind it as well? When you resume Guitar Hero World Tour or Guitar Hero: Metallica from a pause (presumably Smash Hits and 5 as well), you get taken back to the paused note highway(s) and you get a countdown timer, so if you had to pause in a hurry, the number of notes you will actually miss is minimized.

Or, hey, how about doing Guitar Hero one better and rewinding 10 seconds? Sure, it could be abused, but maybe scores from songs paused and resumed would not be added to the leaderboards or something.

4. Turn "No Fail Mode" into "Studio Mode"
"No Fail Mode" is stupid. Let me just put that out there. The point of the game is to hit notes, and the penalty for that is the crowd loses interest, and eventually boos you off stage. "No Fail Mode" makes it so if you abandon your controller or the song is just that damn hard (see "Life is Beautiful" by Sixx:A.M. or "Once in a Lifetime" by Talking Heads) you get booed, but you never get kicked out. So I say, drop "No Fail" and rather, have an option to drop the crowd. You get no crowd meter, and no feedback - positive or negative - from the fans (who aren't even there). You can't fail, either, even if you abandon the song from the start. The song just plays, and gives you your score at the end. "Studio Mode" is the best name I can think of; "Basement Mode" works too.

5. Custom Difficulty
If you've never played Rock Band before, could you tell me the difference between Easy, Medium, Hard, or Expert? Many veteran players can't, either. They just know that Easy only uses the first three fret buttons, Medium the first four, and Hard and Expert all five. And that the speed increases as you go up. Fewer notes does make things easier, but slower? Not always. I was playing on drums - doing badly as ever - and my wife suggested I go up to Hard. I was on Medium and couldn't hack it there. Reluctantly I tried - and got twice as far. On drums, Easy and Medium are just too slow. But Hard and Expert have too many notes. There are some good reasons why I can't play the drums right that have to do with my hand-eye coordination and other mental capacities, but part of that also has to do with a hastily-designed difficulty setting. How about letting the player choose the frequency of the notes and the speed they're delivered? The learning curve could be lowered quite a bit without sacrificing gameplay.

6. Better vocals!
This one's below the belt, because until voice recognition technology advances quite a bit, singing in any music game is not going to be tracked accurately at all. It's been said by quite a few on ScoreHero and other Guitar Hero and Rock Band communities: "Either I can sing the song correctly, or I can get points". Some songs require you to scream, others require you to wail, sometimes when the singer himself - or herself - is doing no such thing. Take "21 Guns" by Green Day - does Billy Joe whine and scream? No, he doesn't - it's a very calm song. Yet, you've gotta make yourself sound like a pissed-off Bob Dylan to sing it. It's flippin' stupid. Guitar Hero is far behind Rock Band in vocal tracking, but that's little consolation when Rock Band's sucks to start with. Still, they made a game that incorporates singing - it's on them to make it work right. As opposed to just sweeping it under the rug and letting people just "deal with it".

7. Music video mode and MP3 export
You can actually hack this together in Rock Band 2 with a couple cheats (game modifiers). Turn on No Fail Mode and Performance Mode. Enter Quick Play as a vocalist, and pick your songs, make a setlist. Choose whatever difficulty, it doesn't matter. Start the "game", then go into the pause options and take out the crowd noise, turn the mic volume all the way down and the vocal track all the way up. Resume, and the game will play the songs you've chosen as mock videos. But this should be available from the main menu as "Music video mode" or "Jukebox mode", and rather than letting you choose the difficulty (which means nothing), it would let you choose the arena, and configure other options as well. I mean, iTunes charges $0.99 in the US for songs. The Rock Band Store charges $2, $1.01 more. It's not a lot to be able to jam along with the song, but it should do a bit more, I think. I also think it should export songs you buy - if you like - if you have a 20GB hard drive, you might not prefer this - to the console's hard drive, so you can listen to them in other games. At $2 a song and considering you can't get music off the console, why not?

8. Rock Band Online
What's really hurting Rock Band right now is the fact that, not only is it not a bestselling or top game (program), but not everyone gets online with their game console. But above all that is the fact that Xbox 360 players cannot play with PlayStation 3 or Wii players. None of the three work together on their own networks. So to make online play work, Harmonix needs a central server to play games on. The only problem is that that is not free. Good online play vs. what I hear is shoddy online play is the difference between paid online gaming (Xbox 360) and free online gaming (PlayStation 3). Not dissing Sony, but a lot of people say that. Regardless, Harmonix aren't gonna do it out of the kindness of their hearts at a loss, and we shouldn't expect them to. A nominal fee is reasonable. And this fee would let you play online, not just with owners of the same console as you, but with owners of the other two, as well. I'm not at all sure Microsoft, Sony, and Nintendo would support it, though, but it's something worth suggesting. But being able to compete with owners of other consoles wouldn't support the makers of the other consoles, specifically, but would in fact make all of them better. Just ask Activision why they didn't continue their policy of "you can only use OUR hardware" that they used in Guitar Hero 3. It's like the representative said, "How many drum controllers should you need?" (or something like that). Such limited interoperability can only benefit them.

All that being said, while Guitar Hero never attempts to be more than just a music game - and it's a pretty good one, at that - Rock Band is much more - it's a music platform. And I cannot reasonably say that it is "pretty good" at that. Much more than Guitar Hero, but as such, it should strive to be so much better than it is.

So here's my open challenge to Harmonix: Stop competing with that silly little guitar game and shine on your own as something much better.

YouTube to Block Internet Explorer 6 Users

Hold up now. I did not say that YouTube was going to block Internet Explorer users. They are going to block users of Internet Explorer 6 (and presumably prior versions). Internet Explorer 6 is the version of IE that came with Windows XP, and it's the last "Classic" version of IE before Microsoft threw the GUI in the blender. IE 7 and IE 8 are both ugly as sin, but that's the least of my concerns with Internet Explorer. IE specifically does not block ads and cannot be made to do so - that's my biggest beef. But I'm using Firefox (actually Portable Firefox) and encourage others to do the same. Or if Mozilla creeps you out (their funky licensing or their rising popularity) and for some reason Google doesn't, they offer a browser called Chrome. There's also Opera, which scared people away by being the last paid web browser (it's since been made free). Fifthly, there's Safari, made by Apple, recently released for Windows. So there are five major choices there. IE 7+, Firefox, Chrome, Opera, or Safari.

The real story here is that many people actually still have or still use IE 6. It actually isn't a bad browser, compared with IE 7 and IE 8. It just needs to be configured properly to be safe (or relatively so). It's not going to do the tricks Firefox can do, but it's not bad to just hit the Net real quick for something, in a pinch, or if that's what's installed at work. The fact that YouTube is not a safe site to be accessing at work is entirely beside the point. I don't know what your job is. Maybe you have a lot of down time and YouTube keeps you sane. I don't know. Don't really care, either.

Xbox 360 Summer Update

It's been 8 months since Microsoft's last update to Dashboard, the operating system of the Xbox 360. My wife's brother incorrectly believes that the old "blade-style" Dashboard is in fact Windows XP and the "New Xbox LIVE Experience" Dashboard (often abbreviated NXE) currently out is Windows Vista. Let me tell you, once a Southern boy gets his mind made up about something, even if it's incorrect, it's best to just leave it alone. Her sister's ex believes that Metallica started as a country band in Greenville, NC, and that their "crossover album", "Enter Sandman" was their first rock album. ("Enter Sandman" is the title track to their 1991 self-titled album, and while it may be their first rock album, they had four metal albums out before it, and no country albums, although vocalist James Hetfield has been known to sing in country bars.) Anyway, NXE put a lot of Xbox LIVE customers off LIVE for up to three weeks, depending upon when they updated (the problem was resolved on November 19 of last year with another update). But once they sorted out all the bugs, as was the case with Windows XP, it turned out to be a gem.

This update makes fewer important changes than NXE, and does not contain the Twitter and Facebook components featured at the Electronics Entertainment Expo (E3) last month. Twitter is an interesting website, but they can keep Facebook. If they had announced a MySpace integration, that would be noteworthy, but for social networking, I haven't seen anything that can unseat MeatSpace just yet. I have maybe four friends on Facebook - meaning, only four people I know have Facebook accounts. One of them is my wife. On MySpace, I have about 40 friends. I'm not a collector; other than a couple bands, it's just people I know in real life. So it is actually useful to me, though lately it's been much more "potentially useful" than useful, but it's nice to have one for what I do (or rather, don't do with it).

The main thing about this update seems to be the addition of a Marketplace for paid clothes and accessories for your Avatar, the little digital character which represents your profile, introduced in NXE last year. Up until this update, Microsoft have released free clothing and accessories to the pool of free items you can choose from every couple months, and I hope they continue to do so. This time it's Kanye West shades, last time it was beach-wear. Usually it's just a couple items sharing a theme; once they added over a dozen shirts for all the soccer teams. My Avatar still wears England's. Not because I watch soccer. I just like the look. (Matter of fact, you can always see my Avatar on this blog over on the right, below the About Me section.) Every update, I check the newest gear against what I already have. Will I pay $1-4 for gear for my Avatar? Probably not, unless it was something really cool. But a lot of people will, so this will make Microsoft some money against what will probably be a very minimal investment. Halo 3 and Fable II accessories are already confirmed, and Microsoft owns those franchises, so they don't have to pay anybody for the rights. They offer a telescope, which C|Net attribute to the LucasArts game "The Curse of Monkey Island", but LucasArts doesn't own the rights to a generic red telescope. The implication is there, but that's it. The telescope, and a rubber chicken, are $2 (160 Microsoft Points) each. Your Avatar can play with a remote-control toy of a Warthog, an off-road vehicle in Halo games, for $4 (320MSP). Other pricing is to be announced.

Other features include savegame timestamping, an improved Achievement browser (not shown at the C|Net link, but seen elsewhere), and a feature to let you watch movies, Mystery Science Theater 3000 style, with friends online. The library is limited, though, and all participants must not only be Xbox LIVE Gold members, but also Netflix subscribers as well.

This update was initially planned for a week ago, the 20th, but was pushed back to the 11th of August. Way I see it, that's over 3 weeks. Hopefully LIVE works when it comes down the pipes.

//Update: The update is out, and we got it. I believe it is out for everybody now, but at first, only Xbox LIVE Gold members could get it. It didn't offer it to me (my account is only Silver, as I don't play online) and I'd been playing Oblivion for three hours. As soon as Jen signed in, though, it sent it to us. Took about five minutes to download, and installed with no problems. Surprisingly, LIVE worked following the update. The avatar accessories are cool, and there are a ton of designer clothes you can buy as well, from Adidas and Quicksilver, if you're into brands. I want a lightsaber, but it's $5 - for a lightsaber for my avatar to play with. Right... Also, the stormtrooper and Obi-Wan Kenobi outfits are cool, too. Nothing I'd pay for. Avatar clothes and accessories for sale start at 50¢ and go up to $7 (though that's a $5 outfit and $2 helmet sold separately). They say you can win them in games as well, but I'm not sure if old games will be retro-patched to allow the accessories to be won, or if it's new games only. The only other feature I use is rating games. I promptly gave Oblivion my only 5-star rating. I rated Rock Band 2 4-stars, and Guitar Hero: World Tour and Grand Theft Auto 4 3-stars. (And caught some hell from Jen for rating Rock Band 2 below Oblivion, but she can rate 'em both whatever she likes under her own account.)

PortableApps.com Sweeps SourceForge.net Awards

How about some actual NEWS on this blog, eh?

PortableApps.com has swept SourceForge.net's Community Choice Awards 2009, taking four awards in the following categories: "Best Visual Design", "Best Commercial Open Source Project", "Most Likely to Change the Way You Do Everything", and "Best Project".

"Best Visual Design" is sort of a vague category. How a program looks, I would think, to those who follow open source, is entirely secondary to how useful it is. If a program isn't worth a damn but looks good, it's worthless. If the program is good and it's ugly, it doesn't matter. But if it can look good and be useful, well, that's just nice. The PortableApps.com Platform (PAP) isn't all that pretty - unless you like red, that is - but skins can make it very nice. The latest PAP, just in time for CCA '09, includes a half-dozen color schemes for the same skin. Green, my favorite color, is more of a teal. Black, my second choice, is just a dark grey. And on top of all that, the lighting in the skin is just funky. Thankfully users can make their own themes, and there are some very good ones out there. On top of that, the developers' apathy (one such topic, they usually wind up deleted) towards the community's requests to add folders makes the visual design feel weak (though I'm not sure if that would go under design or function), and still, the menu can display 20 programs and it can put your favorites on top. So while I have plenty to say about the visual design, I still voted for PortableApps.com out of loyalty, and I'm not unhappy to see it snag this one. Not a lot of programs look great "out of the box", but PortableApps.com does try.

"Best Commercial Open Source Project" doesn't make sense, since the menu and programs are free. However, I'm told that it qualifies because PortableApps.com is seeking alliances with flash drive manufacturers to brand their drives with the PA logo and include the Platform and several of the apps, and this is a commercial venture. It hasn't happened yet, and I don't know why; what good is a flash drive other than running portable applications? A giant floppy disk? You can use the Internet for that. For storage, DVD-ROM is cheaper and more reliable. Even though I can probably do it for less, I would buy flash drives with PortableApps branding, both to support the project, and as a gift. But they better team up with Corsair or OCZ, because portable applications aren't worth a crap on slow flash drives. USB 2.0 is pretty much a must, and the flash memory inside must be fast. As it is, VLC Media Player and OpenOffice take a minute or more to open, and some of Firefox 3's security features must be disabled for it to work at all, otherwise it will just halt for several seconds at a time, every few seconds. It's a mess, but hopefully PortableApps.com's wins at CCA '09 will push for faster flash drives.

"Most Likely to Change the Way You Do Everything" is the category I was most excited about, and, to be honest, the only category I cared about PortableApps.com winning. The other contenders included a Linux distribution, an audio editor, a media player, a password safe, and some stuff I'd never heard of. Nothing worthy of such a title. PortableApps.com, on the other hand... you can't get closer to what that title stands for than running programs on a flash drive which run in a virtual sandbox and run the same from computer to computer. They're not limited to flash drives, either: if you can plug your phone into your computer, you can use that, too. Same for iPods and other portable media players, digital cameras, the Sony PSP... pretty much everything that you can plug into a computer and is recognized as a drive that you can store files on. Just carry the cable. Or install it on a second hard drive, internal or external. Then, should you choose to upgrade to Windows 7 (bad idea) or Vista (worse idea), or you're using one of those and you're going back to XP (smart move), your portable applications will work just the same, no need to reinstall them, no need to configure them. Get a big external hard drive, and keep all your multimedia on it, put the portable apps on that, and then when you go somewhere, carry it all with you. It's great. I believe application portability is even more important than netbooks and other small laptops. You go somewhere, you don't need a tiny computer, you just need portable applications, because most likely, where you're going, there'll be a computer. Nearly all the benefits of having your own computer can be gotten by having portable applications on a flash drive.

"Best Project" is a hell of a shocker and I don't think anybody actually expected PortableApps.com to take it. When you think open source, you think Linux - for over a decade the terms were virtually interchangeable. Then there's Firefox. Some might even know OpenOffice.org, the free alternative to Microsoft Office. Or VLC Media Player, the all-playing media player. You can load it on a computer with a DVD-ROM drive but that will not play DVDs, and VLC will play the discs, no problem. Or if you have movies stored on your flash drive, that works just as well. So there are a lot of great open source projects out there. I suppose what sets PortableApps.com apart is that anybody can take advantage of it. OpenOffice might be great for businesses, but what does it do for media junkies and web surfers? Probably not much. Likewise with Firefox and VLC Media Player. But PortableApps.com's Suite includes all of it. Or you can do what I do (and strongly recommend, as the Suite doesn't get updated, like... ever) and just download the Platform and get your apps a la carte, just get what you want. And on top of that, PortableApps.com isn't the only place to get portable applications, it's just the best, they stick to open source, and their stuff is tested. I know of a portable warez site that churns out over 60 portable applications a month, but can the same quality as PortableApps.com be expected? Maybe some of them don't need PA's attention to detail, but I'm sure some do.

Other winners include: phpMyAdmin (Best Tool or Utility for SysAdmins), XMind (Best Project for Academia), Audacity (Best Project for Multimedia), Notepad++ (Best Tool or Utility for Developers), ScummVM (Best Project for Gamers), Firebird (Best Project for the Enterprise), OpenOffice.org (Best Project for Government), and eeebuntu (Best New Project). Notes: Audacity is the audio editor I was making a dig at in the "Most Likely to Change..." category, though I use it to make ringtones. It's really a great program, and ironically PortableApps.com is shunning the latest version, despite it having clear advantages over the one they do offer. The official reason is that it's labeled as beta software, which is not only common for open source in general, but it's also the state of the current PortableApps.com Platform. ScummVM is a neat program which loads games created in LucasArts' SCUMM engine, most famously used by Maniac Mansion, but also for a game I grew up with, Zak McKracken and the Alien Mindbenders. What ScummVM doesn't do, however, is break the clever copy protection in these games. Zak, for example, constantly asks for codes which were printed in black on a dark maroon sheet that came with the game, and copies of that document just don't exist anymore. Oh well, I suppose it's the thought that counts.

$2M for 24 songs?

By now anyone not spent the last week in a cave has probably heard that a jury somewhere in the middle of Nowhere (Minnesota?) awarded that modern Mafia, the RIAA, nearly $2 million, to be paid by a working mother of two or four, depending on who you read, because she or her kids downloaded 24 songs on KaZaA. On iTunes, in America, songs go for 99¢ apiece, but I've heard in Europe they go for what amounts to $1.29. I pay 160 Microsoft Points ($2) for songs in Rock Band, but those aren't just songs, they include nine instrument tracks (3 difficulties times 3 instruments), a vocal track with lyrics, a couple facts about the band for the loading screens, and sometimes, custom band gestures for the virtual band on the stage (though Guitar Hero is bigger on this point). Even at $2, 24 songs are only worth $48. 24 into the $1.92 million award means each song got paid for, at the $1 rate, 80,000 times. Given the way file sharing networks work, you're not going to share a song you downloaded 80,000 times. I guess it depends.

Impulse or nonpayment?
The RIAA would like the general public to think that every song downloaded is a sale lost. Just ask yourself, of all the songs you've downloaded, would you have paid a buck for each one if you couldn't get it for free, or are there some you got just because? (Everyone downloads, including the "high and mighty" on Internet forums who say they've never downloaded - 9 times out of 10 those are the biggest pirates, testing the waters or somesuch.) So while every download represents a kind of interest, it doesn't exactly translate to a lost sale. Besides, it's clearly not lost sales they're concerned about, per se - how many sales will they lose with a $1.92 million fine? I'd say all of them; she's not going to be in a position to buy a CD for quite some time, and people all over are calling for boycotts of music from RIAA-represented labels.

From lost sales to sales
The recording industry's biggest challenge right now is converting lost sales, real or imaginary, to real sales that bring in money. CDs alone are pretty useless; since so many people play music on portable devices now, "ripping" a CD is almost too much work, so acquiring digital files is now the new thing, but the early players - mostly iTunes, but others as well - loaded the music with copy protection, which the industry demanded to keep piracy in check. Problem is, CDs remained more convenient - you could still rip a CD. But more cars play CDs than Mp3s, and more home stereos play CDs than Mp3s as well. So, though CDs can be burned from digital audio files, CDs remain relevant. But it's not just a convenient format - music has to be desirable. The packaging is a good place to start. When I was a kid, albums and tapes came with lyrics, and liner notes, and pictures. You can download that stuff, but the original packaging, back then, was special. They don't really do that anymore. All you get now is just the track listing, and that leads some to wonder, "why not just download it?" On top of that, so many people are saying the quality of music is deteriorating. Perhaps the labels should be listening to these prospective customers? But by far, the most ambitious method they've used to get sales, to get people buying music again, is the Rock Band franchise. This "game" lets you play along with music on plastic instruments, and it's available for all gaming consoles, even the last-generation PlayStation 2. It's not very demanding as far as games go and really only amounts to a puzzle game, at best, but it's getting people buying music. We've spent more on songs than we have on both Rock Band and Rock Band 2. We have 332 songs on our Xbox 360's hard drive. More importantly, not one downloadable Rock Band song has been pirated yet. You can pirate the game disc itself, which includes 55 songs (Rock Band) or 84 songs (Rock Band 2), but you need a modified console to do it, and not that many people actually do. And since it came out that the Xbox 360 has a killswitch Microsoft can flip if they catch you modifying that console, it's a really stupid thing to try.

Computer security
In the 1990s, we learned that a computer must have antivirus. In the later part of that decade, anti-spyware became the next big security measure to take. Now, a computer must additionally have PeerGuardian. The developers of PeerGuardian track the RIAA and other anti-filesharing companies and maintain a list of the IP addresses of these computers, and prevent these computers from even seeing your computer. So say you're downloading a song that is hosted by the RIAA. Your filesharing client will basically act like nobody who has the file is actually sharing it, when, in truth, all of the peers are blocked. You can see them but they cannot see you, so they are not going to share with you. Now, once some poor schmuck who isn't using PG downloads the song, you can download from them, and when they catch a C&D letter, you won't get one at all. Welcome to the third tier of computer security: anti-spy. A secure machine must now protect against viruses, malware, and online spies in order to be safe. Because now they don't just want to damage your computer. They don't just want to use your computer as a slave to attack other machines. Now they want to get to you through your computer and attack your economic situation; essentially, they want to rob you through your computer. "Don't they have the right..." No, they don't have the right to take away our Fourth Amendment rights, which protect us from unlawful searches, which is what this amounts to.

What comes next?
It should be obvious to the casual observer that the RIAA is not going to collect $1.92 million from this case. The RIAA traditionally offers a settlement in the neighborhood of $3,000-$5,000 to keep the case from going to trial, and they haven't ruled out closing the door on that offer, even though the case has been decided for much higher. That would stem any argument that the woman would never be able to pay the fine. It would be a huge economical hardship, but not impossible. Still, it would be a huge loss for the RIAA, twofold at that. First, the case has cost them a lot of money already, money they're not going to fully recover regardless. And second, if this woman has to pay anything above her means, she's probably never going to purchase a CD ever again. (Would you?) On top of that, people across the Internet are calling for a boycott of RIAA-backed labels' music. There is really just no easy solution for the RIAA. If they don't go after people for downloading music, more people will do it. The more they do, however, the more people hate them. And if you go onto an Internet forum populated by members of sites like The Pirate Bay and isoHunt and ask them what the RIAA should do, the unanimous answer will sound something like "roll over and die". Of course, if they disbanded tomorrow, and the record companies they represent all folded, the impact on the economy would be severe, as they do employ thousands. And of course, if they go under, who will bring us the popular music we like? Radiohead was able to offer their album "In Rainbows", I believe it is, for "whatever cost you feel like paying, including nothing" because they're already an established act. Millions of unsigned bands have been giving away music on MySpace and through other venues for years; it hasn't gotten them signed, let alone Radiohead-level fame (which, I admit, is quite a ways away from, say, Metallica fame, or better yet, The Beatles fame, but I digress).

In short, the recording industry needs to look at what's working and what isn't. Some things they're doing are effective, such as songs in Rock Band; also, microSD cards for phones which contain full albums in MP3 format. That's brilliant. Services like iTunes and its competitors are a good idea, moreso now that they're using regular MP3s, not copy-protected AAC and WMA files. Financially wrecking otherwise honest Americans is not working, however, and especially in this recession, amounts to both class warfare and economic terrorism. It's that serious. It's $1.92 million serious.

Portable Applications, and Right & Wrong

A few months ago, I wrote about this great new technology in PC computing called "portable applications" by which applications were not installed (to Windows and its Registry), as usual, but rather installed (to a flash drive, usually, and set up for portability) and then could be used on any computer. Normally, when you install a program, the old way, it is tied to that Windows installation. You can't move the program's folder to a flash drive and run it on another computer, because it hasn't got those roots. Likewise, you can't reinstall Windows and expect the program to still work, for the same reason. And why should it be this way? Why should a program which has nothing to do with Windows be tied to Windows? The most practical reason is file associations. Generally, you want your media player to open your music and video files when you double-click on them. Nevermind the fact that, if you're not careful, a Windows Media Player upgrade will steal those associations away. Also never mind the fact that virtually every media player has a means to open media files themselves. Most also let you "drop" media files on them to play them. The double-click method is the most convenient, sure, but you can set this up without having to tie a program to the system. Internet Explorer wasn't even part of Windows initially, but since the third edition of Windows 95 (colloquially referred to as "Windows 97" but more lengthly titled "Microsoft Windows 95 Microsoft Internet Explorer" on the loading screen) it has been. Before that, it was its own program and Windows Explorer, the file manager in Windows, was completely different. Does anybody remember Windows Explorer before it was married to IE?

All in all, portable applications are great. You can take your favorite programs and their settings you've fine-tuned over the years from computer to computer. And all portable applications are free and open-source, right? Well, that's what their chief proponent, PortableApps.com, might have you believe. Well, another advantage to a complex installation is that if your program is commercial, it can also be tied to one user and steps can be taken to ensure it isn't being shared by all your friends. Of course, software piracy is even older than music and movie piracy; it's been going on for years. Software that's controlled by alphanumeric codes (like Windows) is shared with a code that works. Software that's controlled by online activation (like Windows XP and newer) is shared with altered files which have been tricked into believing they've been activated. But not everybody can follow often simple instructions to get a downloaded version of a commercial program (such as Adobe Photoshop, one of the biggest targets of software piracy) to work. Portability to the rescue. Once an application is thusly cracked, it can be made portable, and then the process is automated for everybody. Make no mistake, this is illegal as hell, but it's done every day and fewer than a thousandth of a percent of software pirates are ever convicted of a crime or sued. If that.

But while most people honestly know that pirating paid applications like Windows and Photoshop are illegal, did you know that it is also a violation of many free programs' end-user license agreement (EULA) to redistribute them without permission? Technically, while you can download and use programs like Winamp (a media player) and CCleaner (a computer maintenance program) free of charge, you can't burn them on a CD and pass them off to your friends. You can tell them where to get the programs, or email them the links to the official webpage, but you can't just redistribute them. But wait, you say, what about sites like Download.com, Softpedia, and FileHippo? These sites get permission, and that's OK. If you, a nobody on the Internet, email AOL (they publish Winamp) or Piriform (they make CCleaner) and ask for permission to share their programs with your friends, your emails will probably go unanswered, or you'll get a nice form letter thanking you for your interest and directing your questions to the program's homepage. On the other hand, if you pass off the programs, nobody will care, most likely. But what about Firefox and VLC Media Player (formerly known as VideoLAN)? These programs are open source, which is supposed to be the big savior of software. While open source is freer than freeware, there are still some caveats. For open source, you have to share the source as well. Firefox, despite popular belief, is not 100% open source. The logo and name are trademarks of Mozilla. You can redistribute Firefox the program, but you cannot call it Firefox, or use the logo. People do do this, of course - Iceweasel is one, and Blackbird is another. Both are basically Firefox, but they have a new logo and name. I don't recall what the story is with Iceweasel, but Blackbird has a black theme and is set up with bookmarks and extensions which, as a complete package, are supposed to make it the ideal web browser for African-Americans, whatever that means. Sounds separatist to me. As a "white boy", I'm highly tempted to use it, just for laughs. "Hey, I'm rockin' BLACKBIRD..." Heh...

So anyway, they tell me over at PortableApps.com that it is in fact illegal to redistribute closed-source free programs like CCleaner and Winamp (CCleaner is the more usual target of these discussions, Winamp is just my example) and that it is illegal to redistribute open source software without the source code. And they get pretty serious about these things, too! While I admire their dedication to righting wrongs, I find hypocrisy in the fact that they publish portable versions of emulators, programs used to play old console games. Specifically, they carry programs which emulate NES, Super NES, and Game Boy Advance games. Now, personally, I have no problems with emulators or people who use them. I really don't. I've in fact used two of the three programs they offer - the NES emulator I used was another one. Not too sure about the one they have, but it must be good if they chose it. And here's the thing I've tried to explain to them: Nintendo has never authorized the use of those games on personal computers, and in fact they speak out against it at great length. Some console games were available on other systems, including PCs (MS-DOS, usually). Some were ported to newer consoles (the Game Boy Advance has a "NES Classics" series, for example; also the Nintendo DS features a Nintendo 64 game). Konami even released both Contra and all three Castlevania games for the NES on the PC, using what amounted to an emulator. That's all fine and that's all legal, but at the end of the day, Nintendo has license agreements in every game manual saying the game is only licensed for use on the console it was designed for.

In their defense, members of the PortableApps.com forum have offered a couple defenses. First, they argue that emulators don't violate any licenses, it's the ROMs (the game files) that do, and they don't offer them. True, but the emulator is good for nothing other than running these ROMs. They argue that programs like VLC can be used to play pirated music and video files. This is also true, but they have many legal uses as well. There are no legal uses of emulators. Second, they've argued that they use emulators for "homebrew", software written by others to run on consoles. That's cute on the console, but running console homebrew on a console emulator is pointless. The point of homebrew is to extend the features of the console. There's no console homebrew which beats the equivalent software on a PC. Furthermore, they failed to name any of any merit. They've also argued that they play games they still own, but the consoles have fallen into disrepair and have been given or thrown away. When I asked if they actually kept all those games in a drawer, that question went unanswered as well. Essentially, they were blowing smoke, covering up the fact that they have no respect for Nintendo's licenses of paid software (games). Also, most of these defenses are answered by Nintendo's legal FAQ. Yet they will go to war over freeware, and open source, particularly Firefox.

Now, I know I sound like a real bastard saying all this. The truth of the matter, actually, is that I really don't care if people use emulators. I've used them. They just don't make games like they used to. Games used to be fun, so fun we didn't care how bad they looked. They looked good to us not because they did, but because they were fun and we genuinely loved playing them. Now it's all about polygon counts and frame rates. Games push people to buy a new computer every year just to keep up, but are the games actually getting better? Quite the opposite, in fact. There are some great games out there, but they're so few and far between. Deus Ex (2000). Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas (2004). The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion (2006). Rock Band 2 (2008). Deus Ex: The Nameless Mod (2009, independently produced!). There are more, I know I'm forgetting a few, but this decade, compared with the last, is quite shameful for gaming. Those are some of the shining stars, though. So yeah, emulation is fine by me. But so are sites that redistribute Firefox and other free programs. They're fine by me. I do not see the problem. I do not see the problem with people downloading old console games they have no legal business playing on their PC, for a good many reasons, so who bloody cares if somebody passes along free software to a friend? Not I, that's for sure.